Does Moodiness Put You in the Mood?

Take two elusive phenomena-our moods and our sexual interests, put them
under the same microscope, and what do you have?

A steamy French novel or a bold new area of research at The Kinsey Institute
under the
Institute under the auspices of its director John Bancroft.

The Institute has embarked on a project that seeks to discern the impact
of certain emotional states on sexual interest and responsiveness, using
interviews and a short questionnaire, posing questions about how depression
and anxiety affect a subject's sexual desire and response. The results
so far have been surprising.

Bancroft explains: "Conventional wisdom maintains that when an individual
feels anxious or depressed, his or her sexual desire goes down. There
are, however, a few pointers in the literature to suggest that for some,
the opposite happens. In our survey we found that for a significant minority
of about 15-25%, sexual interest and responsiveness goes up when they
are in a nagative mood. This phenomenon has not previously received attention."

The researchers are also interested in whether an individual's propensity
for sexual excitation and inhibition, the theme of much of the Institute's
current research, helps to account for this paradoxical response. To some
extent they call predict that the relationship between negative moods
and sexual interest is more likely in men who are prone to high excitation
and low inhibition.

David Strong, a research associate at the Institute, conducted the interviews
that contained some of the initial questions on mood and sexuality. He
describes the interview process and some of the challenges of the new
topic. "We are interested in the relationship between mood, arousal,
and control, both self-control and control in the context of interpersonal
dynamics," he explains.

"The goal of the project," he further reflects, "is to
see if there are different types of relationships between negative moods
and increased sexual interest. Certain types could be relevant, for example,
to the prevention of sexually transmitted disease. Individuals who take
sexual risks often do so because of a negative mood, not a lack of knowledge.
To reach these people, we must address issues of mental health."

Erick Janssen, a research scientist at the Institute also working on
the project, outlines some of the project's intricacies. "What we're
really looking at is the relationship between different emotions, how
different emotions interact with one another in different people. How,
for example, can two seemingly incompatible emotions go together? And
how does physical arousal relate to both cognitive and emotional processes?"

He further points out, "The topic fits neatly into the history of
research at the Institute. Kinsey himself continually sought to account
for individual variation within a population. This can be rare in experimental
research which often focuses on norms at the expense of variation."

To look at this issue more closely, researchers at the Institute are working
on more sophisticated methods of measuring the relationship between moods
and sexual behavior. So far, Bancroft explains, the data reveal that the
tendency for negative moods to increase sexual interest is age- and gender-related.
Young men are most likely to report this effect.

All three researchers convey that the new project has broad practical
and theoretical implications. "I wish I had started earlier on the
topic," says Bancroft. "I could foresee working on it for the
next fifteen years, if I was around that long."